Pokévengers - New Update - Chapter the Fourth

[cashew]

I'm trying to push through the draft, but editing is a pain and I'm still debating if I want to make a more detailed outline for the coming NaNoWriMo. Each chapter is a little over 5k words and trying to keep all the plot points straight is...ugh. (So far there's been close to 30K words posted to the Pokevengers story.) I'm starting to develop a headache. Meanwhile...

Poké-cast this chapter

Steve:
Shiny Braviary

Wanda:
Delphox

Sam:
Staraptor

Tony:
Scizor

Bucky:
Lucario

Previously on Pokévengers...
Chapter the First
Chapter the Second
Chapter the Third
Chapter the Fourth

---

The road continued innocuously and, by late afternoon, the party had managed to climb nearly half way up the mountain. It was at this point that the forest along the sides of the roads began to close in, the overgrowth blocking out the sky with barely enough light filtering through the leaves to illuminate the forest floor.

"OK, now I know this can't be natural," Tony said as they made their way through the darkened forest. "There's no way trees are this dense this high up a mountain. We're way past the tree line."

"Since when did a city slicker like you became an expert in mountain ecology?" Sam questioned.

"Since Dad spent all of his days working and Mom spent all day drinking," Tony answered. When Steve and Sam gave him equally skeptical looks, Tony added, "Look, the '50s was a difficult time for kids like me, OK?"

"The depth of your problems is more than just the '50s," Sam muttered, but said no more as the road came to a dead end.

In front of them, the wood's brambles have so overgrown the path that it was no longer passable. The wall of tangled hedge extended well past their sight lines in either direction.

"Great, now what?" Tony asked no one in particular.

"Now, adventurers, it's time for you to take on the Grass Trial," a disembodied voice suddenly rumbled at them.

"Who is that? Who said that?" Tony demanded into the empty air.

Accompanying a rustle of leaves, a rotund creature stepped out of the tangled foliage. It resembled a flower in that it had giant fleshy petals atop its head, which released a pungent odor. The smell was so strong that even Steve's much diminished avian olfactory sensors was able to pick it up. Beside him, Sam made a wafting gesture with his wing.

"I am the guardian of the second trial, Vileplume," the creature announced. "You may have passed the Water Trial, but you will find that the Grass Trial is not so easily over come by mere brawn alone."

Startled, the party of five leapt into action, preparing for a fight. Bucky already had his paws up at the ready. Wanda's stick flared to life. Sam and Steve took to their wings, while Tony's claw glowed with some kind of energy.

The creature, Vileplume, looked at their battle poses and scoffed.

"Pah. Relax yourselves. I'm not so silly as to try and fight the five of you, although I imagine such brutishness served you well in the last trial. No, for this trail, it will not be I who challenges you, but the forest itself. You'll do well to use your minds as well as your muscle if you hope to succeed."

Then the Vileplume released a fog of spores or some such particulate matter, and suddenly the party was coughing and choking on a cloying smell.

Soon enough, the air cleared and they could see that the previously closed hedge had an opening just wide enough for them to pass through in single file.

"I'm going out on a limb and guess we have to walk through this for the trial," Tony said.

"Yeah, and I'll bet you we're heading into a maze of monsters," Sam agreed as he flapped his wings hard to get rid of the remaining pollen in the air.

"Be on your guard, everyone," Steve warned as he took point.

Without further instruction, Bucky brought up the rear as the party proceeded through the entrance single file.

What greeted them on the other side of the hedge wasn't a swarm of flesh eating plants. Instead, it was an empty maze, one with walls that reached high over their heads and disappeared into the canopy. The denseness of the foliage above them meant it wasn't possible for the flying members to gain a bird's eye view of the layout. And when Tony tried to forcibly cut through the maze, they found out quickly just exactly why that was a terrible idea.

"Nah-ah, no cheating, now," the voice of Vileplume floated down to them from...somewhere. And in the next moment, they were doused in a shower of choking spores that left them shaking and coughing for minutes on end.

"No cutting our way through the maze, got it," Tony wheezed.

"So, who's good with directions?" Sam asked.

When no one said anything, he sighed and placed one wing against the maze hedge. At Tony's skeptical look, Sam said, "A cousin of mine swore this was the way to solving any maze. Just follow the wall until it gets to the end."

"I feel like this is a really good way to walk in circles," Bucky muttered, but obediently placed a paw on the wall as Sam instructed.

"No, no, it has something to do with the nature of maze design," Sam defended his methods as they proceeded at a brisk pace. "The walls of a maze are always connected to other walls. As long as you keep the hand against the wall and follow it , any dead ends you run into will bring you back to the original intersection while you head in the opposite direction from where you entered. This way you can avoid getting all turned around and confused."

"I feel like now's when I'm starting to miss GPS," Tony muttered as they walked down the green corridors.

He didn't have long to miss modern technology, however, as very soon they were found out that not all dead ends were created equal, as a sentient rose leapt out of nowhere and sent a storm of petals flying their way. The petals flew so fast that their edges stung against their skin as the shower of foliage blew past.

"Enough of your games," Wanda yelled, impatient, as she breathed fire at the rose monster.

The rose monster burst into flames and fell to the ground in a blackened heap.

"Is it dead?" Sam asked, looking unsure if he wanted to approach the remains to find out.

"Does it matter?" Tony asked. "This clearly isn't the exit."

And so they continued, each unsuccessful dead end fueling their growing frustrations, with the occasional enemy jumping out to further test their nerves. Although Wanda's fire made short work of the enemies — it was super effective at burning the plant-life into a crisp — there was obviously enough attrition to drain Wanda of her energy. By the tenth such dead end, she was visibly panting. And the party was no closer to finding their way out of the maze.

"We can't keep on going on like this," Steve decided as he took in how Wanda was starting to flag.

"Yeah, there's go to be some kind of clue. The maze master said we needed to use our brains for this one, right?" Bucky pointed out.

The party looked around the featureless maze, trying to figure out just what they could use as an indicator. The leaves looked identical to the untrained eye and no turn in the maze had shown a noticeable sign that differentiated it from any other intersection.

Finally, it was Tony who said, "OK, maybe the thing we're supposed to notice isn't the presence of something but the lack of something."

"What do you mean?" Steve asked.

"I mean that it's a pretty common design bias — people are always trying to add something to solve a problem, so they overlook the possibility of removing something as a solution. It happens in coding all the time. Sometimes the solution is just delete whatever isn't working instead of coming up with more spaghetti code to work around the bug. Point is, maybe we're approaching this maze problem all wrong. It's not that the right path is marked so much as the wrong one's on notice. So, if we look for a path that's missing something all the other ones have—"

"Like this really scraggly bush here?" Bucky pointed down a path where the foliage looked like it had seen better days.

"Yeah, like that," Tony agreed.

Raising one pincer, he slashed at the dry twigs and revealed an extension to the maze.

"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go," Steve urged as they made their way down the previously inconspicuous path.

The path twisted and turned and soon they arrived at an arched gateway of ivy. The disembodied voice of Vileplume spoke up.

"Well, would you look at that. It seems you are not completely hopeless. Congratulations, you have come to the end of the maze, but do you have what it takes to solve the final puzzle?"

As the Vileplume's words finished, a rumbling shook their feet. Vines shot out from the ground, waving about like the tentacles of some deep sea cephalopod as they lashed about and struck against the surrounding growth. Alarmed, the party backed up as the ground bulged and buckled, and a tree grew from the cracked terrain amidst the swirling vines. As the tree continued to rise, it was followed by a truly bizarre looking creature, one that was attached to the tree by its back. As more of the monster rose out of the ground, it was clear that the vines and tree were both growing out of the creature's skin.

The monster released a low frequency bellow, a sound that resembled the rumbling of rutting buffalo, the ground trembling hard enough to shake the party's bones.

"It's a Venasaur!" Sam cried as if that was supposed to mean anything to the rest of his party members.

"I thought you said we're not going to be fighting in this trial?" Tony yelled into the skies. "You lied!"

"I said that you can't rely on brawn, I didn't say you won't be needing it," Vileplume's voice echoed primly back at them.

"Less talking more hitting," Steve said as he prepared to take to the skies with Sam.

However, before they could act, a cyclone of fire engulfed the Venasaur and, in the next moment, the Venasaur crashed into the ground in a charred heap, much like the attacking roses had fallen to Wanda's fire when they were wandering in the maze.

Wanda blew out her stick and twirled it around in her paws like a baton before saying, "You are welcome."

"Well!" the Vileplume appeared before them atop the defeated Venasaur, sounding more vexed than impressed. "I guess you brutes had what it took after all. But don't get too full of yourselves, the next trial will surely trip you up."

Then, in another puff of pollen, it and the defeated Venasaur vanished. The entwined branches of the forest loosened, then retreated, revealing a path leading up the mountain.

---

"OK, am I the only one who feels like this world is messing with us?" Tony asked as they trekked upward.

Their inventory had lightened significantly now that they've depleted a substantial amount of the berries that Clint packed. They were at a point where Steve was starting to take a mental inventory of the berries growing along the path and he was seriously considering the logistics of foraging their way back down the mountain after meeting the Slowbro. It couldn't be any worse than the time when the Howling Commandos finished the last of their rations with still three days left until mission completion and Falsworth had to hunt wild rabbits for sustenance until they arrived at the rendezvous location.

There were some benefits to traveling with a noble who had the leisure to learn how to hunt for sport.

"This world ain't right, that's for sure," Sam agreed. "And I thought the cartoons were already nuts enough as it is."

"How is it that we're in a world where trees literally move just so they can form a maze to 'test our mettle' or whatever it was that the plant-thing said? Why are we playing its stupid games to prove our worth?" Tony continued to rant as they climbed a steep slope. "How does a world even develop symbiotic relationships like this? Whatever happened to Darwinian evolution?"

"Weren't you the one who thought we're in some kind of shared hallucination?" Steve questioned as they trudged against gravity.

"I'm beginning to revise that hypothesis," Tony conceded. "I've done a lot of recreational drugs and this...whatever this is, it's nothing like that — and I wasn't this lucid either."

As the rest of the party gave him critical looks, Tony retorted, "Don't judge me, it was a difficult time in my life and I was overseas, OK?"

"All right, so it's not a mass hallucination. Then what do you think this is?" Bucky asked.

"Who knows? Our current science can't explain how any of this is possible," Tony replied. "But I'll bet you it has something to do with Mr. Purple Potato Head."

"You mentioned something about that — before," Steve remembered. "What do you mean he came to destroy the world?"

"Seriously? You don't remember anything?"

Steve shook his head.

Tony sighed and explained, "I don't know why he came to earth. Just that he did and Thor warned us that he wanted to destroy the world for some reason and he has been doing this for a while, now. Remember when Loki came down at us with an army of Chitauri? Yeah, that was him, too."

"But why? What did we ever do to him?" Sam asked.

"Do alien overlords need a reason? Point is, he was looking for the Mind Stone that made Vision and Buck-o here was on the run. Again. And Vision was tasked with tracking him down — seriously? Nothing? None of this rings a bell?"

Sam, Steve, and Bucky answered in the negative. Wanda frowned, trying to recall something, but gave up and also shook her head in defeat.

"I remember the Raft and then...it's like there's a blank fog covering my memories from that moment forward," Wanda explained.

Tony shifted uncomfortably at the reminder of the unlawful imprisonment that he helped to perpetuate.

"I wonder why Stark's the only one who has any memories of how we got here," Sam asked.

"Maybe his armor protected him from some of the effects of whatever force sent us here," Bucky said.

The others looked at him in surprise.

Bucky shrugged and continued, "I mean, if whatever did this really is using technology, then it make sense if the technology in Stark's armor can partially shield him from the energy. Stark's armor runs on the arc reactor, right? That's the same stuff that powered the Tesseract. If whatever sent us here erased our memories using something similar to how Hydra did it to me, then the energy field from the arc reactor could've interfered."

"I'm impressed, Tin Man's got a heart."

"I can still punch you, you know that right, Stark?"

"It's a joke, Barnes."

"It's not a funny one. Your dad wasn't such a yuckster, where'd you get this from?"

Tony stiffened at the mention of his father. Then with an overly casual shrug, he said, "Mom was always the more sensible one."

"Classy lady," Bucky agreed.

For a moment, tense silence fell on the group as Steve tried to figure out Bucky's angle. Sam chose not to find out and quickly changed the subject.

"What do you think the next trial is going to be like?" he asked.

"More battles with more Pokemon, I'd say," Steve replied, also eager to move on to a safer topic. "What did you mean by 'starters', Sam?"

"Yeah, that's apparently a thing the games do. See, according to my niece..."

As Sam launched into an explanation about the Pokemon franchise from the perspective of a six-year-old, the rest of the party fell into quiet attention. Bucky and Tony took the moment to move to opposite ends of their procession.

Their journey continued without further ado until the next obstacle. This time, the obstruction came in the form of a sheer cliff face and no obvious way around, over, or through. As the party looked up and pondered if this was the next trial, an innocuous fox with six tails appeared from nowhere and spoke.

"Are you the adventurers who seek an audience with the Water Mystic?" it asked in a child's voice.

Startled by the amiable creature, so used to hostility from Pokemon outside of the village's fences, the party took a moment to realize that the creature was indeed greeting instead of attacking them.

"We are the ones who hope to see the Water Mystic," Wanda answered for the team.

Whether because the creature is nicer than the other Pokemon or it saw some kinship with the current fox-like Wanda, the six-tailed fox greeted them with a courteous bow.

Introductions over, it got to the point and said, "If you'll follow me, I will be your guide to the next trial."

Then, without waiting for the party to respond, it took off running. The party quickly followed and soon they soon arrived at an obscured cave entrance, far off of the main path.

"The trial begins here," the creature told them.

Then it walked into the cave.

The party members followed, their worries beginning to rise seeing as how little information their guide had given them.

The cave was dim and became quickly unnavigable if not for Wanda's fire. Ahead of them, the six-tailed fox continued to run, its movements agile with familiarity while navigating the semi-darkness.

They proceeded deep into the cave when suddenly, the interior came alight from the glow of spewing lava. Heat washed over them and they paused to take in the terrain.

Stretched across the bottom of the cave floor was flowing magma, still bubbling from the pressure of the mantle. Above the molten lava was a perilous bridge formed from hollowed rocks, which provided the only safe crossing over the burning river. Standing on the other side of the bridge was their six-tailed guide, urging them to hurry.

"The bridge is safe," the fox called from the other side.

"Yeah, I have my doubts about that," Tony said.

"Nothing we can do about that. We'll have to cross," Steve agreed as he took the first step.

The others watched as Steve wobbled across the precarious bridge, flapping his wings for balance as he went. When he made it safely across, Sam took to the bridge next.

Despite two successful crossings, Tony continued to voice his concerns and, instead of testing out the structural integrity of the bridge as the previous members had, he took to his wings and flew the entire way, ignoring the accusatory looks from his other winged companions.

This left only the flightless Wanda and Bucky on the other side without the safety net of wings to help them over.

"I will go first," Wanda offered. "I am lighter."

Bucky didn't argue with the logic.

With one foot in front of the other, Wanda carefully tip-toed across.

Despite the rumblings of the lava, the bridge remained intact.

Finally, it was Bucky's turn. The four party members watched with baited breath as Bucky began the perilous journey. As Bucky approached the center of the bridge, the already roiling magma boiled over. A column of liquid fire shot up like a geyser, close enough to make Bucky fall on his stomach and Steve shouted in vain.

"Hurry, the lava is becoming unstable. We must leave before the eruption begins," their guide urged.

"I'm walking as fast as I can," Bucky sniped back as he belly crawled along the shaking bridge.

The force of the fiery geysers caused the rock bridge to tremble ominously. Then, the pathway cracked under the strain and the rocks broke apart into pieces beneath Bucky's feet.

"Bucky, no!"

Steve acted before he could think. With a flap of his wings, Steve was diving toward the falling Bucky. Then, talons outstretched, he grabbed one of Bucky's flailing limbs and heaved. He beat his wings with force and desperation, pushing against the air as he heaved against gravity. Finally, their downward descent slowed to a stop. With another heavy flap, Steve surged upward and carried them to the ledge where the rest of the team was watching.

Bucky panted, catching his breath after the nearly deadly fall. Wanda and Sam rushed over to fuss over him while Tony bellowed for their six-tailed guide.

"What the hell was that? Come out here so I can beat your fox-face in you little weasel!" Tony yelled at the empty space where their guide had been.

The six-tailed fox was nowhere to be seen, but its voice was clear as day. From the depths of the darkness, it called out, "Quick, come here, there's an exit."

"Well, we can't go back the way we came," Sam said, reasonable and put out.

With no better option, the team pressed forward in the dark, guided by Wanda and the childlike voice, which called to them over and over. As they pressed on, the light from Wanda's stick revealed the hanging stalagmites that surrounded them, and a curious movement in the shadows that looked like the scampering of cave creatures.

"Stay alert guys, there's something out there," Steve warned.

"Tell me something new. The monsters have been trying to kill us ever since we got here," Tony snapped, his voice overlapping with their guide's calls as it echoed off of the cave walls.

As they walked, the darkness continued ceaselessly, and the sound of the repeated encouragement from the six-tailed fox grew weaker as they walked.

"Hey, aren't we going the wrong way?" Bucky asked.

"No, it's the Doppler effect. The noise bounces off of the cave walls and shifts to a lower frequency, making it sound like the noise is coming from the other direction," Tony answered.

"Are you sure? Because it really sounds like we're walking away from our target. I've done plenty of tracking in the woods back—"

"I'm telling you, it's an auditory illusion," Tony interrupted, impatient with Bucky's skepticism. "If you watched any Start Trek you'd know. Kirk got caught in one of the episodes in the caves and—"

"Dude, are you seriously using Star Trek to explain things now?" Sam asked with disbelief. "It's called 'science fiction' for a reason."

"The science in Star Trek is factually sound, unlike the sci-fi shows made in this century," Tony seethed. "Gene Roddenberry took his science seriously and he's a role model for modern would-be screenwriters. The shit Hollywood puts out today can't even compare."

"Tony Stark is a Trekkie, now I know this world is messing with me," Sam bemoaned.

Their back and forth suddenly cut off as their guide once again materialized into view. It sat in front of a craggy boulder and was digging at it with one paw.

As the party approached, it turned around from its labors and said, "The exit is right past this boulder. But the rocks, as you can see, are blocking the way. If one of you had the ability to smash apart the rocks, then we'll be able to escape."

"Leave it to me," Bucky said as he approached the rocks in question.

Giving the rocks a measuring look, Bucky estimated the resistance and pulled back a paw. With a mighty lunge, he punched his paw into the pile of rocks. Fissures cracked along the boulder and, with a reverberating crash, the entire thing fell apart in a shower of dust.

Just as the team was preparing to pass the newly cleared tunnel, a rock creature floated out of the crumbled gravel. It looked no different from the rest of the rocks around it, except for the fact that it had two arms sticking out from either side of this spherical body.

It was floating. In midair.

"Who dares to disturb my slumber," the creature demanded in a gravely voice.

"Oh great, another fight?" Sam asked.

"Any advice, Pokemon expert?" Tony solicited as he prepared himself, his wings buzzing behind him.

"Nah, my niece wasn't into the ugly ones."

"She thought the Venasaur was pretty?" Bucky asked in disbelief.

Surely there wasn't a more ugly creature than the warty toad sporting a palm tree on its back.

"She thinks Bulbasaur's cute, OK?" Sam replied.

"Boys, watch out," Wanda called out as she leapt out of the path of flying rocks.

Sam wasn't so lucky and got crushed under the airborne boulders as they fell, one wing pinned down and unable to move.

"Everyone scramble!" Steve yelled.

The remaining team members immediately moved in opposing directions, trying to distract the rock creature from focusing on any single member.

The rock monster suddenly spun in place, flinging gravel in every direction, spraying projectiles in 360 degrees. The imprecise attack missed the fleeing team members, but it reminded them that in a cave, there was no cover from the monster's attacks.

"We gotta get closer!" Sam shouted from under the rock pinning him down..

"The rest of you hit the ground!" Bucky ordered.

Then, without waiting to check if anyone listened, Bucky charged at the monster, one paw raised. Shifting his weight side to side, he dodged the incoming attack and slammed his paw into the monster's body in a brutal blow. He followed up the action with two kicks, then ended the maneuver by slamming the side of his other paw into the monster in a karate chop.

The monster wobbled, then fell to the ground, motionless.

"OK, I'm beginning to suspect our guide here haven't been all that truthful with us," Tony said as the danger passed.

Turning quickly, he grabbed the six-tailed fox by one of its tails and lifted the creature off of the ground. It struggled for a moment, its legs flailing wildly as it tried to wriggle away. But soon, when its struggles brought no reprieve, it stopped and hung limply in defeat.

As Tony subdued the fox, Steve and Bucky dug Sam out from under the pile of rocks he was pinned under. He was worse for the wear and looked like he could use a break for the rest of the day.

Dusting himself off, Sam suggested, "Let's rest and come up with an exit strategy that doesn't involve getting led around by our noses by our so-called guide."

"I haven't been lying," the fox pleaded. "Look for yourselves if you don't believe me. The exit is just down this path. I didn't expect a Geodude to be hiding in the boulder. How could I have planned something like that?"

"Funny how you're supposed to be guiding us through the trial but we keep almost getting killed," Tony pointed out.

"The trial is meant to test your worthiness. Did you not also fight in the previous trials?" the creature asked in return.

"Sure, but the fights were a little more controlled, not this chaotic shit you're putting us through," Sam observed. "Besides, none of the opponents actually tried to kill us or put us through life-threatening situations. Bucky could've died falling from that bridge. What would you've done if Steve didn't react fast enough?"

"Testing the team's cooperation is part of the trial," their guide defended itself.

"No, Sam and Tony are right. Something's off about this trail of yours," Steve said. "None of the other trial masters gave us direct instructions like you have. You're not testing us, you're setting us up to fail."

The fox finally stopped talking.

It hung limp in Tony's grip for a moment as the party waited for its response. Then, without warning, it began to glow. When the glow became blinding, Tony released the creature with a yelp of pain and the glowing fox expanded in size, taking on a new shape with nine tails sprouting out behind it.

"Nufufufu," the now much bigger fox laughed menacingly.

Its nine tails fanned out behind it as though a halo and an aura of ill intent emanated from the creature.

"So you've seen through my tricks. It's true, I am not a trial master, but foolish Pokemon, you've fallen into my trap!"

As its words finished, the creature opened its mouth and a stream of flame jettisoned out of its maw. The fire swirled and encircled the party, its heat burning and singeing their outer coverings. Steve tried to move, but the fire continued to spin around them, not allowing them to escape.

"You've been trapped by my fire, what will you do now?"

"What do you want with us?" Steve demanded as they stood immobilized at the center of the firestorm.

"Well, not much. But dinner would be a good start," the nine-tailed fox said. "Roasted pigeon is on the menu tonight!"

"I thought Pokemon ate fruits!" Sam protested.

"Ah yes, the Villagers," the monster nodded with a sneer. "Of course, they somehow had gotten it into their minds that Pokemon can live in peace. I don't know where they got such silly notions. Eat or be eaten, that was the law. It always has been until that Red Octillery came along, spouting silly ideas of Pokemon superiority and shouldn't become food. Such nonsense! But alas, Pokemon seemed to have taken to those ideas, even the ones who didn't follow Red Octillery, and now they've banded together to eat berries. Unnatural, I tell you!"

As the monster continued to rant about the natural order of the world, one where Pokemon were meant to fend for themselves instead of uniting around artificial identities, the spinning fire around the trapped party members grew weaker with each passing sentence. Noticing the change, Steve shared a look with Sam and the two of them took advantage of the nine-tailed fox's distraction to flap their wings in unison and generated enough gust to put out the remaining flames.

The monster screeched in fury as its trap was blown apart.

As the monster fumed, Tony leapt at the distracted monster, slicing his pincers across the width of his chest for maximum leverage as he slammed the carapace against the monster's head. Beside him, Bucky made the same motion, landing a solid blow on the nine-tailed fox's spine.

The creature yelped in pain.

Wanda finished off the attack by releasing a dark ball of energy at the monster, which enveloped then sent it shrieking before falling to the ground in a limp pile of fur.

"Let's get out of here before this thing comes to," Steve said.

The team agreed readily and followed the cave path as they searched for a way out. It seemed that the creature hadn't been lying about the tunnel leading to an exit and soon the party was back under the sun and on the road leading to the mountain top.

As they rushed to cover more ground, Sam asked, "So, that thing the monster said about eating Pokemon..."

"I'm trying not to think about it," Bucky confessed.

"Yeah, but what if it's true? What if Pokemon weren't meant to live in villages and eat berries? In the cartoons, the Pokemon lived more like wild animals."

"I thought we've established this isn't like the Pokemon cartoons?" Tony asked with impatience.

"No, we established that this place is based on something from the Pokemon franchise, but how does this place actually work? We still have no idea," Sam replied. "This world is messed up, and I don't mean messed up as in how everything is trying to attack us. I mean the rules of this world doesn't match anything we know about Pokemon."

"You mean like there's a bug in the code?" Tony clarified.

"Sure, if that's how you want to think about it."

"Do you think we were brought here to fix the code, then?" Wanda suggested.

"I don't now if it's that deliberate, but maybe, I'm thinking if we fixed what went wrong, then the world will eject us out of here, since we never belonged here in the first place," Sam said.

"That nine-tailed fox mentioned a Red Octillery, didn't it?" Bucky asked.

When Sam nodded in agreement, Bucky continued, "You think that the Red Octillery have something to do with this bug thing?"

"Seems like too much of a coincidence that a Red Octillery shows up, starts lecturing about a superior Pokemon race and then a Psyduck hails Hydra," Steve agreed.

"Do you think the Red Octillery is Schmidt?"

"I saw Schmidt get vaporized by the Tesseract. But...he could've been teleported here by the space stone the same way we were," Steve agreed.

"So we're going to need find this Red Octillery if we want to fix what went wrong in this world," Tony concluded. "Can't be too hard if we're gonna wipe the memories of the only Hydra agent in our custody."

"Hydra's agents were never talkative, even when they were humans," Steve said. "I doubt we'll get any useful information no matter how long we probed the Psyduck. We're better off trying to find Schmidt by searching the world than interrogating his agents."

"Is that how you guys did things during the war?" Tony asked. "Because I'm starting to think maybe the Russians really did do most of the heavy lifting after all."

"You should tell Natasha that," Bucky advised.

Tony gave him an unamused glare, but dutifully shut up.

The party walked in silence after that tête-à-tête. After a while, Wanda asked, "What if instead of asking the Slowbro to erase the Psyduck's memories, we ask it to read its mind instead?"

"Is that even possible?" Sam asked.

"If the Slowbro can erase memories, then it must have some ability to see into other Pokemon's minds," Wanda insisted. "It can't hurt to ask."

"Yeah, assuming we survive the next trial," Tony muttered.